Familiar Self Research Articles

On parallel laser beam merger in plasmas

Self-focusing instability is a well-known phenomenon of nonlinear optics, which is of great importance in the field of laser–plasma interactions. Self-focusing instability leads to beam focusing and, consequently, breakup into multiple laser filaments. The majority of applications tend to avoid a laser filamentation regime due to its detrimental role on laser spot profile and peak intensity. In our work, using nonlinear Schrödinger equation solver and particle-in-cell simulations, we address the problem of interaction of multiple parallel beams in plasmas. We consider both non-relativistic and moderately relativistic regimes and demonstrate how the physics of parallel beam interaction transitions from the familiar self- and mutual-focusing instabilities in the non-relativistic regime to a moderately relativistic regime, where an analytical description of filament interaction is not available.

Community-based art therapy for the coexistence of South Korean Youth and North Korean youth defectors: A phenomenological study

The existentialist philosopher Martin Buber argued that I, Thou, and We connect organically through dialogue and that coexistence is necessary for an authentic existence. However, coexisting with others entails challenges, especially when there are tremendous cultural differences, as with South Korean youth and North Korean youth defectors. Therefore, this phenomenological study investigates how the two groups of adolescents—two South Korean teenagers and six young North Korean defectors—from conflicting cultural backgrounds learned to coexist through a community-based art therapy project. Together, they completed a symbolic collaborative artwork called The Village-Making Project in a semester-long afterschool program. As a result, the participants’ lived experiences were categorized into three themes and seven subthemes to show related phenomena: (a) looking at the familiar self from a new perspective, (b) understanding others by defining myself, and (c) developing We through coordination and reconciliation. The researchers discuss the meaning of community from an existential standpoint and the therapeutic role of the arts in helping community members coexist.

Between the Islamic and Chinese Universal Empires: The Ottoman Empire, Ming Dynasty, and Global Age of Explorations

Abstract This article studies two sixteenth-century Asian texts: Khitay namah, a Persian travelogue about the Ming dynasty written by the Muslim merchant Ali Akbar and presented to the Ottoman sultan, and Xiyu, an illustrated Chinese geographical treatise with detailed travel itinerary from China to Istanbul by the Ming scholar-official Ma Li. In addition to demonstrating the breadth of Ottoman and Chinese knowledge about each other in the global Age of Exploration, these two books, written respectively for the monarchs of the self-proclaimed Islamic and Chinese universal empires, reflect the Ottoman and Chinese imperial ideologies in an era when major world powers aggressively vied for larger territories and broader international influence. Both the Ottoman and Chinese authors recast the foreign Other as the familiar Self – Ali Akbar constructed an Islamized China while Ma Li depicted a Sinicized Ottoman world – to justify their countries’ claims to universal sovereignty and plans for imperial expansion. Like many contemporary European colonial writers, Ali Akbar’s and Ma Li’s exploration of foreign societies, their literary glorification of their own culture’s supremacy, and their imposition of their own cultural thinking on foreign lands all served their countries’ colonial enterprise in the global Age of Exploration.

Experiences of quality of life the first year after stroke in Denmark and Norway. A qualitative analysis

ABSTRACT Purpose: This study aims to explore quality of life (QOL) during the first year of recovery after stroke in North Norway and Central Denmark. Method: Individual in-depth interviews with 11 stroke survivors were performed twelve months after stroke onset. An interpretative, inductive approach shaped the interview process and the processing of data. Results: We found that QOL reflected the individuals’ reconstruction of the embodied self, which was identified by three intertwined and negotiating processes: a familiar self, an unfamiliar self, and a recovery of self. Further, we found that reconstruction of the embodied self and QOL could be framed as an ongoing and interrelated process of “being, doing, belonging and becoming”. Enriching social relations, successful return to work, and continuity and presence in professional support during recovery enhanced the experience of QOL. Fatigue and sustained reduced function hindered participation in meaningful activities and influenced the perceived QOL negatively. Conclusions: The two countries differed in descriptions of continuity and support in the professional follow-up during the recovery process, influencing the degree of encouragement in reconstructing the embodied self. Reconstruction of the embodied self is a means of understanding stroke survivors’ QOL during the first year of recovery, supporting an individualized and tailored rehabilitation practice.

Stranger Anxiety: When Children Face Strangers

Till about seven months, the baby mostly flees from contact with strangers, often avoiding eye-contact without the parent’s awareness. A reaction of resistance and anxiety when approached by a stranger is commonly seen around eight months. In this paper I explore this emotional responding in the context of a novel re-conceptualization of healthy narcissism processing as an emotional immune system. Whereas recent discussions in the literature have focused on the anxiety reaction, I propose that key to understanding this commonplace phenomenon is the understanding of how healthy narcissism works to safeguard that which is familiar and resist that which is strange. The operation of these psychic processes may be likened to those of the biological immune system, which safeguard the familiar codes of the body and repel alien invaders. In safeguarding that which is familiar and repelling the alien, healthy narcissism operates as an emotional immune system. It is promoted by good-enough attachments (object relations) characterized by our being loved the way we are (true self), in separateness and not according to someone else’s blueprint (false self), one that risks invading our familiar self. The more we are loved for who we truly are, our self-integrity is more immune to invaders, and throughout our lifespan, we are more immune to alien influences, and to the incursions of others’ hurtful words and deeds. Healthy narcissism is thus understood as providing, from birth, emotional immunity to our sense of self-familiarity. We come to recognize ourselves and the partners of our various relationships via continually being alerted to and subsequently resisting or rejecting strangers/strangeness (i.e., invaders), and by gradually tolerating and even befriending the otherness. Befriending is possible when we are able to discover some familiarity embedded within the stranger. The appearance of eight-month resistance/anxiety, a normal alertness to strangers, signals that the baby has a rudimentary sense of both self and object constancy and is able to differentiate between his familiar “not-I,” such as the parent/caregiver whom he experiences as familiar and is attached to, and the unfamiliar “not-I” stranger. The parent/caregiver is then experienced as a bridge between that which is familiar and that which is strange and anxiety-provoking/overwhelming. Parents’ reactions to the “not-I” (of their baby) can help the infant differentiate between a “not-I” he might befriend, and one that is best avoided. The normal emotional immune reaction reflects a good-enough balance between preserving the familiar and true self, and befriending the otherness, to which one remains appropriately but not excessively alert.

The differential outcomes procedure can overcome self-bias in perceptual matching.

There are biases in perceptual matching between shapes and labels referring to familiar others, compared with when the labels refer to unfamiliar people. We assessed whether these biases could be affected by differential feedback (using the differential outcomes procedure [DOP]) compared with when feedback is provided using a nondifferential outcomes procedure (NOP). Participants formed associations between simple geometric shapes and labels referring to people the participant did or did not know (self, best friend, other). Subsequently, the task was to match a label to one of two shapes shown on a trial. When feedback for correct responses was given following the NOP condition, matches were faster to known people (self and friend) compared with those to an unknown person (stranger). However, this advantage for known personal relations was eliminated when participants were given feedback for correct responses following the DOP condition. The data are consistent with prior work showing that the DOP can facilitate the learning of taxing associations (for the stranger stimuli relative to the familiar self and friend stimuli). In addition, the results suggest that the facilitated perceptual matching for stimuli associated to individuals known personally may reflect better individuation of the association between the shape stimulus and the label, a process enhanced by using a DOP for associations with unfamiliar people.

Encountering Language Difference in Australian Memoirs of Living in France

Travel memoirs tend to be premised on the transformation of the self through spatial translation. This paper explores the roles language might play in this transformation, and the possibilities of a linguistic translation of the self among memoirs of Australians in France. Among the recent rush of memoirs by Australians of their sojourns in France, the encounter with French language is invariably evoked. Its depiction, however, differs from that identified in ‘language memoirs’ by migrants and other language learners, which have been seen to emphasize the renegotiation of identity through inhabiting a new language. More often, in the Australian memoirs, either language difference is portrayed as having a limiting effect, diminishing the author to a shy shadow of the familiar self, or the author's proficiency in French smooths over language difference, concealing it. Only in rare instances is language represented as the very means of transformation of the self, reforging the author's experience. One such instance is Ellie Nielsen's memoir Buying a Piece of Paris, which paradoxically details the process of language learning while at the same time deflecting attention from it and attributing the transformation of the self to an altogether more tangible operation. The article analyses this double game and its implications for identity and belonging.

How the Analytic Process Is Captured and Absorbed into the Familiar, the Feared, and the Desired

In their transference efforts to maintain psychic equilibrium (Joseph, 1989), some patients will do their best to convert their analysts into familiar, dreaded, or desired internal objects which they then react to or relate to. The interpersonal, interactional, and intrapsychic pull for the absorption and utilization of the analyst into a predesigned and pathologically limited figure creates countertransference struggles and phases of enactment that can go unnoticed, denied, or justified. Even when analysts maintain their analytic balance, the patient can manipulate, mishear, and transform words, actions, and intentions into very specific archaic objects or part objects. Case material is used to illustrate the way in which patients attempt to turn the analytic process and the therapeutic relationship into an acting out of wished for or painfully familiar self and object interactions. This method of subsuming the analytic method can be quite subtle, or it can be very obvious but still extremely difficult to shift, interpret, or recover from. Indeed, the analyst can easily be drawn into this perversion of analytic procedure and end up participating in various enactments. With such patients, the nature of the unconscious fantasies projected into the transference matrix and the intensity of the patient's object relational conflicts almost guarantee some degree of ongoing countertransference acting out. So, the ongoing and repetitive interpretive style needed with such patients is both helpful and healing as well as often becoming a contribution to the fundamental pathology the patient repeats in the clinical setting. Although the transference dynamic being examined could be understood from a number of theoretical perspectives, the author focuses on the Kleinian psychoanalytic method.

Food as a Means to Negotiate Cultures in Diana Wynne Jones's Power of Three

In the light of food studies in social science, this article examines references to food, its connotations and the ways in which cultures use such phenomena to legitimate their systems of meanings and ideologies, and suggests that food in Diana Wynne Jones's Power of Three works to conjoin the concepts of self and other and as a means to negotiate and transform the familiar self and the unfamiliar other. As all living creatures must feed, in entering a different culture, one cannot avoid experiencing foods. The probable immediate reaction might be shock or dislike for the unfamiliar taste, and hence quickly it could be consigned to otherness. However, by adjusting one's taste to accept the foods, one opens the possibility of crossing the cultural boundaries constructed through the arbitrary eating habits and altering one's prejudiced presumptions. With a compounded narrative that withholds much story information, Power of Three draws on this dual nature of food to mark it as a means through which both the protagonists and the novel's readers negotiate the notions of self and other as well as cultural boundaries and differences.

America, the Old?

1. Introduction Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 was greeted in most of Europe with joy, or at least relief, an emotion that was shared in a great many precincts in the United States. In both venues a curious mix of language attended these celebrations. A new day had dawned, it was said; the American people had turned a page to give themselves, and the rest of the world, a fresh start. Paradoxically, that meant that the USA would return to being its old, familiar self—a count...

Recognizing and Responding to Early Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis of Individual Narratives

Recognizing and Responding to Early Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis of Individual Narratives

Auto concept y rasgos de personalidad: Un estudio correlacional

Este estudio ha investigado las relaciones entre los rasgos de personalidad y auto concepto. Fueron aplicadas la Escala de Traços de Personalidade para Crianças y la Escala de Autoconceito Infanto-Juvenil en 389 niños, con edad de 8 a 10 años de escuelas públicas y particulares. Se han hallado diferencias de sexo para casi todas las medidas hechas. Para los varones, ha sido observado correlaciones positivas entre extroversión y auto conceptos escolar y familiar, neuroticismo y psicoticismo con auto conceptos personal y social, y sociabilidad con auto concepto familiar; y correlaciones negativas entre extroversión y auto concepto social, psicoticismo y auto concepto familiar, y sociabilidad y auto concepto personal. Para las niñas, fueron observadas correlaciones positivas entre el auto concepto social y psicoticismo y sociabilidad con el familiar; y correlaciones negativas entre extroversión y el social, psicoticismo y neuroticismo con el familiar. Los análisis de los grupos extremos confirmaron los datos encontrados.

Social discrimination in lambs: the role of indirect familiarization and methods of assessment

Familiarization with individuals resulting from direct exposure is the primary mechanism mediating social recognition in many vertebrates. However, discernible phenotypic similarity among close kin may provide an additional basis for recognizing previously unencountered individuals. We investigated the existence of such a mechanism of indirect familiarity among artificially reared twin lambs, Ovis aries, that were separated shortly after birth. When they were 2–3 weeks old, we tested their recognition of familiar penmates, their unfamiliar twin and twins of familiar penmates in two-choice and paired tests. Lambs responded discriminatively to familiar penmates. When allowed to choose between their twins or twins of penmates versus an unfamiliar unrelated individual, lambs did not show any preference. Nevertheless, when paired with a twin or penmate’s twin, lambs bleated less than did those paired with an unfamiliar unrelated partner, which suggests that twins and twins of penmates were recognized. Discrimination between twin and unrelated individuals could be based either on early learning of the twin's phenotypic traits (template) before separation or on a process of indirect familiarization (comparison with familiar self cues). However, indirect familiarization was clearly implicated in the discrimination of twins of penmates; that is, lambs learned the characteristic phenotypic traits of (unrelated) penmates and detected a resemblance between those familiar individuals and their twins. Overall, the two-choice and paired tests were differentially effective procedures depending on the research question being addressed, that is, relatively simple or subtle social discrimination. Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.

Locating Europe

This paper describes the emerging European public space and identity, as it is built and exercised in educational spheres. Discussions on European public space are overlaid with assumptions and requisites of a shared identity and culture. I argue that the presumed inextricable link between such constructs as identities, cultures and political communities is neither tenable nor empirically suitable in the European case. My substantive examples come from an empirical analysis of history and civics school books, as well as public debates and conflicting claims surrounding education. As projected in educational spheres, European identity is a loose collection of civic ideals and principles, such as democracy, progress, equality and human rights. This assemblage of principles and their enactment is what affords the ties that bind in the European public space. European identity as it happens is not on course to replace the nation but reinterprets it as another repository of the same ideals and principles for which Europe stands. The nation still comes across as a source of identification but is no longer unique or commanding, far from its familiar self. The emerging Europe is a space for participation but it does not imply the existence of a European demos or polity in the conventional sense - based on consensus and uniformity. European public space is open to conflict and also creates its own conflicts. It includes multiple spheres and subjects, and is created through the activities of a growing contingent of social and political actors, who engage in the discourse of Europe and deploy strategic action, with or without institutionalized contact with the EU.

Women's experiences of 'being diagnosed' with a long-term illness.

In this paper we share women's storied accounts of 'being diagnosed' with a long-term illness. The purpose of the paper is to raise awareness of health professionals that receiving a medical diagnosis is a potentially calamitous event, challenging self-identity. The three authors were involved in three separate inquiries which explored women's experiences of living with illness. The authors realized that 'being diagnosed' was a common memorable event for the women across the inquiries. The literature around receiving a diagnosis was scarce. This paper is the result of secondary analysis of data from three different projects where we researched women living with long-term illness. In this paper, we focus on the experience of 'being diagnosed' as we share and show women's perceptions of receiving a medical diagnosis. Receiving a medical diagnosis of a long-term illness was a memorable event in the women's lives. Many women felt alone with their illness, often without adequate information to find meaning in the relationship between their familiar self and their new identity as a woman living with illness. They felt vulnerable and lost as they tried to understand the meanings and consequences that the diagnosis held for their present and their future. Informational needs may be specific and individual. For many, receipt of a diagnostic label was momentous and should not be underestimated, despite the initial feeling of chaos, many women felt validated. Receiving a medical diagnosis is one event where health care professionals could be on standby. It is important to take the woman's articulation of the event seriously. Open, genuine communication, with willingness on behalf of the health professional to listen would be affirming for women who are coming to terms with the diagnosis of a chronic illness.

Living with Loss: The Stroke Family Caregiver

Stroke family caregiver self-losses are the focus of this study. The data presented here were collected as part of a larger study of stress, coping, and adaptation in stroke family caregiving. Information on personal losses was derivedfrom a series of intensive interviews over time with stroke caregivers involved in home careforfirst-time stroke survivors during the acute phase of recovery. Thematic analysis of audiotaped transcriptions indicated that family caregivers experienced four major self-losses in caringfor the stroke survivor in the home: loss of the familiar self, loss of the autonomous self, loss of the affiliative self, and loss of the knowing self. Implications for family-centered practice to address these four losses are discussed.

Uncanny Reading

UNCANNY READING PETER SCHWENGER Mount St. Vincent University I A t one point in his novel Absence, Peter Handke describes a nocturnal act of reading: The reader’s eyes are narrow and curve at the corners, widening at the temples as though the letters and words, though only a few inches away, form a distant horizon. These eyes show that it is not he who is digesting the book but the book that is digesting him; little by little, he is passing into the book, until — his ears have visibly flattened — he vanishes into it and becomes all book. In the book it is broad daylight and a horseman is about to ford the Rio Grande. (53) The impalpable act of reading here has a palpable effect — which is the paradoxical prelude to complete loss of the palpable, as the book ingests its reader. The flattened ears indicate a passage through what could be a birth canal as well as a gullet, but in either case is a passage out of the familiar self. Not merely absorbed in his book, this reader is absorbed by it, to the point of being taken over by an alien existence. This takeover is like the one spoken of by Georges Poulet in “Criticism and the Experience of Inferiority,” the paper that he delivered at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism. What Poulet, in that paper, finds most extraordinary about the book is its passage from object to subject — to a subjectivity which is not that of the reader. The reader’s response is indeed necessary to constitute it, but the subjectivity so constituted is that of an other. Otherness is no longer outside, in the material pages of the book; it constitutes itself “inside” the reading subject. However, at a certain point this ontology is turned inside out. Like Handke’s reader, we are soon drawn inside the book; we think thoughts that are not our own and perceive, outside of those thoughts, the objects of the fictional world. But because that fictional world has come into being through the experience of inferiority, the outside inhabited by these objects is also interior: they are what Poulet has called “subjectified objects.” There is a liberating effect to this: “the greatest advantage of literature,” Poulet asserts, “is that I 333 am persuaded by it that I am free from my usual sense of incompatibility between my consciousness and its objects” (58). Yet there is an undertone of terror to this process as well: “so long as it is animated by this vital inbreathing inspired by the act of reading, a work of literature becomes at the expense of the reader whose own life it suspends a sort of human being . . . it is a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects” (62; emphasis added). Such language would justify us in seeing the act of reading as a kind of possession, a vampiric siphoning off of one’s life blood to give vitality and movement to long-dead thoughts. Recognizing this possibility, Poulet immediately denies it: If the work thinks itself in me, does this mean that, during a complete loss of consciousness on my part, another thinking entity invades me taking advantage of my unconsciousness in order to think itself without my being able to think it? Obviously not. (62-63) Rather, a common consciousness is produced. The loss of consciousness is not complete; this saves readers from an ultimate ingestion and turns them into critics. There is of course a certain critical distance in any act of reading. Most readers will agree with Poulet that their subjectivity while reading is in a sort of divided trance: vigorous actions are received by us passively; there is a certain delay between our feelings and those of the book’s subject; the book’s events concern us greatly and at the same time have nothing to do with us. This separation from the experience of inferiority is what defines criticism: “Aware of a certain gap, disclosing a feeling of identity, but of identity within difference, critical consciousness does not necessarily imply the total disappearence of the critic’s...